Since You've Been Here
by Mydela
Summary: Challenge songfic. Memories of what once was.


Disclaimer: No. Don't own characters. Still broke.

A/N: Okay, I know I should be working on my actual chapter fic, but I really wanted to write this…um…so I did. It's my first challenge fic and I think it'll just be a one-shot. The song is "Since You've Been Here" from the musical Brownstone.

CHALLENGE: Write a songfic to a Broadway solo sung by a female (main character in the fic does not have to be female)

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Since You've Been Here

_You'd never recognize the room._

It was 1908. Sarah Jacobs stood in the middle of the long central room of a Manhattan brownstone building.

The room was devoid of people, abandoned. No one lived in the old Newsboy's lodging house anymore.

_The pictures all have different frames now._

When the Lodging House closed, no one took the pictures. Sarah supposed that nobody wanted to remember. The photographs of various groups of newsies still lined the walls, the most precious things many of the occupants had ever owned abandoned with as much ease as old shoes.

All the pictures were yellowed now, being of poor quality anyway, and haphazardly framed in scraps of blue cloth. Sarah vaguely remembered that the frames had once been red. She guessed that cloth had long since deteriorated and then replaced.

_The furniture is rearranged now._

The last group of newsies to stay here had moved the bunks all around. It was strange to see the room, so familiar to Sarah in the past, and yet now so different, the bunks scattered aimlessly about as though they had been shoved away in a mad dash to get outside.

The quiet of the place unnerved her, echoed in her ears. It wasn't natural for _this_, of all places, to be silent.

_Somehow I've thrown out every souvenir_

Jack was gone, of course. He left a year before, begging Sarah to come with him to Santa Fe, to forgive him for the countless times he'd been unfaithful to her, promising a new life in a new place.

Sarah refused.

He left the next day. She kept all the street treasures he'd given her over the years: useless foreign coins, a slightly bent faux-gold necklace, a long, perfect falcon feather, a wrought-iron flower knocked off the top of some swell's fence. She kept them for months, tucked away in a corner of the bureau. She ran across them just a few weeks ago, looked at them for a moment, and then threw them out. Let some other guttersnipe dig them out of the garbage to impress his girl with.

Quite suddenly, she'd realized that she didn't need them anymore.

_Yes, there've been changes made since you've been here._

She hadn't known about the newsies' house being closed down until very recently. A wealthy businessman had bought it, intending to turn the bottom part into a store and the top into apartments. It hadn't happened yet. He'd turned the newsies out and then just let the building sit there. Sarah was quite sure that many newsboys snuck back in at night to sleep, especially in the winter. They had nowhere else to stay.

Jack would have thrown a fit had he been here when it closed. He was brilliant at stirring up public support. Anyone who'd witnessed the strike nine years ago would know that, but that wasn't the only act of strong public defiance he had committed. After turning eighteen, he decided he was too old to sell papers and got a job at a factory. He organized a union there. He got fired, but the union stayed. The next factory he worked at coincidentally needed a union, too. And the next.

He couldn't hold a job worth shit, but boy could he organize unions.

_You wouldn't recognize the street._

Sarah wandered out of the eerily quiet building and blinked in the bright autumn sun. There were more automobiles now, and a trolley rumbled by. It hadn't been there the last time she'd walked down Duane street.

_Our favorite stores had different names now_

She walked to Greeley Square and stopped at the statue, looking around pensively. Memories flooded over her. She stared at a butcher shop on the corner that used to be the bookstore.

Jack hadn't wanted to go into the bookstore at all. "I read the papes, ain't that enough?" he protested.

"No," Sarah said firmly, leading him inside. "Come on."

"But—but—" they entered the shop and the clerk glared at them to be quiet. "I don't _want_ a book for me birthday, Sarah!" he hissed.

"You aren't paying for it so it's not your choice," Sarah hissed back. She ran her hands over the spines lovingly. "You'd like this one," she said, pulling _Oliver Twist_ off the shelf.

His eyes grew wide, looking at it. "Sarah, I don't read so good. You sure you wanna spend actual money on sumthin' I ain't prob'ly even gonna understand?"

Even as he spoke, she took the book to the counter and paid for it. "You'll like it," she said, handing it to him. "Happy birthday."

He rolled his eyes, but a month later he met her by the statue, excited beyond words. "That Dickens fella, he knows what he's talkin' about! Who'd'a thought somebody writ about orphans an' them—" he jabbered on excitedly about the characters and the plot for some time.

The bookstore became a favorite haunt for them, and soon the clerk trusted them enough to actually borrow books, provided they brought them back soon and in the same condition.

Now it was a butchers', Sarah thought, abruptly coming back to the present.

_The colors on the trees have changed now_

She started to walk again, looking thoughtfully at the trees, taller now, the leaves turning gold. She wondered if there were trees in Santa Fe, and if there were, if the changed color in the fall.

_Strange how I've hardly thought of you this year._

It was true. She'd thought of Jack a lot after he'd first gone, then again when she'd found his gifts hidden away in the bureau, and finally now. But there were months on end when she'd never thought of him at all.

_Yes, there've been changes made since you've been here._

_You'd never recognize my life._

She thought about Michael, her fiance. He was Jack's complete opposite. She'd been excited by Jack, drawn to his carefree independence and dreams. But he had never wanted to settle down, to find a steady job, to marry or have kids. Sarah wanted marriage and a family.

Michael would give her that.

_I play a much more careful game now._

She had been so cautious around men after she and Jack had stopped going together, which was really a considerable time before he left, not since he'd cheated on her for the sixth or seventh time. Still, she was quick to mistrust the men she'd been set up with, afraid they were going to hurt her or leave her.

Michael was really the first since Jack.

_And when I cry it's not the same now_

She remembered how she cried every time some well-meaning friend told her about seeing Jack with this girl or that girl at this bar or that bar. She cried every time he begged her to take him back, promising to do better. She cried often over him.

_Somehow I never waste a single tear_

Not anymore.

_Yes, there've been changes made since you've been here._

She found herself back at the lodging house. Why had she come here in the first place? It held nothing but bittersweet memories.

She climbed the stairs and once more stood in the middle of the bunkroom, the likenesses of past newsies staring out over the silence like sentinels.

Bittersweet, yes, but really more sweet than bitter. She grinned, remembering when Sass and the other newsgirls taught her to play poker and subsequently took all her money. She also remembered the time they'd gotten her drunk on Red's quite illegal (and quite potent) homemade beer.

She shook her head and frowned. On the other hand, she didn't remember that at all.

_You wouldn't recognize the room_.

Sarah touched a picture, smiling. Then she began to take them off the wall, stacking them carefully on a bunk. Nobody wanted them, after all, so she took them back to her tenement, then left again to buy stamps.

Suddenly, she knew who would want them.

_You wouldn't recognize the room._

_

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A/N: If you do not own the "Brownstone" CD, you need to go to your library and check it out or something, because it rocks a lot. Ahem. So this is perhaps the corniest thing I've ever written. Ah, well. I like these challenge thingies. What? Am I rambling? Surely not! Well, um, review. Please. Because I love you for reading this and I would bake you a sponge cake if I knew you. (Yes, it _is_ quite late at night. Why do you ask?)


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